Autonomous mobile mini-robot with embedded CMOS vision system

This paper presents a prototype of a mobile minirobot with an embedded vision system. The robot control is implemented in a low cost microcontroller and the vision system is based in a proprietary CMOS imaging array. The proposed vision sensor has enough flexibility to be incorporated directly to most microcontroller-based systems without any additional electronics. The CMOS camera sensor has random access readout capabilities and the microcontroller uses the camera like a read only external memory. Therefore, the main advantage of this system is that image-processing algorithms can be incorporated directly in a low cost microcontroller, resulting on a compact vision system with decision-making capabilities. The robot autonomous capabilities have been tested in a soccer game scenario where visual tasks such as object localisation and classification are needed.